At 15:56 +0200 UTC, on 2007-08-21, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
[...]
> The main thing that I agree very strongly with Karl in is that the
> offline and online "gap" should be bridged, and that this can happen
> through setting up clear/strict recommendations for which extensions
> to use - which all sides (authors, authoring software, browsers,
> servers) should pay attention to. This bridging should include
> official language and charset extensions, taking example from Apache,
> which also allready offer its own such extensions, and have done so
> for a very long time allready.
While I agree with the gap needing a better bridge, I disagree that file name
extensions are a solution. They are just one possible implementation for
marking a file's type, charset, etc. Not every environment works with file
name extensions at all (for instance, they were allowed, but basically
meaningless on Mac OS pre-X). And although I do not know, I wonder how useful
they would be for users of non-western scripts -- many users don't understand
the meaning of file name extensions, but if you don't even know the script
they are presented in...
The entire point of the Content-Type header is to allow the conventions of
one environment to be bridged to those of another one. (MIME types are rather
limiting though. Something like the UTIs Apple recently introduced in Mac OS
X would be nicer: <http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/11>)
--
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>